Listening To British Nature

Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio, and Modern Life, 1914-1945 traces the impact of sounds and rhythm of the natural world and how they were listened, interpreted, and used amid the pressures of modern life to in early twentieth-century Britain. Author Michael Guida argues thatdespite and sometimes because of the chaos of wartime and the struggle to recover, nature's voices were drawn close to provide everyday security, sustenance and a sense of the future. Nature's sonic presences were not obliterated by the noise of war, the advent of radio broadcasting and the rush ofthe everyday, rather they came to complement and provide alternatives to modern modes of living.Listening to British Nature examines how trench warfare demanded the creation of new listening cultures in order to understand danger and to imagine survival. It tells of the therapeutic communities who used quiet and rural rhythms to restore shell-shocked soldiers and of ramblers who sought toimmerse themselves in the sensualities of the outdoors, revealing how home-front listening in the Blitz was punctuated by birdsong broadcast by the BBC. In focusing on the sensing of sounds and rhythms, this study demonstrates how nature retained its emotional potency as the pace andunpredictabilities of life seemed to increase and new man-made sounds and sonic media appeared all around. To listen to nature during this time was to cultivate an intimate connection with its vibrations and to sense an enduring order and beauty that could be taken into the future.

This edited collection explores our often-surprising modes of co-inhabiting the cultural and aerial worlds of birds. It focuses on our encounters with non-captive birds and the cultural geographies of feathered flight. This book offers a timely contribution to the more-than-human geographies of flight, space and territory. The chapters support an ethics of attention as a new basis for the conservation and cultivation of aerial habitats. Contributions adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the patterns of intrusion and escape that shape our encounters with birds and unsettle our traditionally terrestrial concepts of space. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of our shared lives with birds, ranging from scientific observation to the social media-enabled spectacle of co-habitation and spatial competition. Written in a thought-provoking style, this book seeks to address a dearth of critical perspectives on the cultural geographies of flight and its implications for the ways in which we understand common spaces around and above us in the context of any effort at conservation.

This volume of primary source material examine the thoughts and ideas behind music in Britian during the ninteenth century. Sources explore music critics, listening to music, music education, and philosophy. The collection of materials are accompanied by an introduction by Rosemary Golding, as well as headnotes contextualising the pieces. This collection will be of great value to students and scholars.

Listening After Nature examines the constructions and erasures that haunt field recording practice and discourse. Analyzing archival and contemporary soundworks through a combination of post-colonial, ecological and sound studies scholarship, Mark Peter Wright recodes the Field; troubles conceptions of Nature; expands site-specificity; and unearths hidden technocultures. What exists beyond the signal? How is agency performed and negotiated between humans and nonhumans? What exactly is a field recording and what are its pedagogical potentials? These questions are operated by a methodology of listening that incorporates the spaces of audition, as well as Wright's own practice-based reflections. In doing so, Listening After Nature posits a range of novel interventions. One example is the “Noisy-Nonself,” a conceptual figuration with which to comprehend the presence of reticent recordists. “Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields” offers another unique contribution by reimagining the relationship between the field and studio. In the final chapter, Wright explores the microphone by tracing its critical and creative connections to natural resource extraction and contemporary practice. Listening After Nature auditions water and waste, infrastructures and animals, technologies and recordists, data and stars. It grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and anchors itself to the question: what am I not hearing? In doing so, it challenges Western universalisms that code the field whilst offering vibrant practice-based possibilities.

Listen to birds sing as you’ve never listened before, as the world-renowned birdsong expert Donald Kroodsma takes you on personal journeys of discovery and intrigue. Read stories of wrens and robins, thrushes and thrashers, warblers and whip-poor-wills, bluebirds and cardinals, and many more bird. Learn how each acquires its songs, how songs vary from bird to bird and place to place, how some birds' singing is especially beautiful or ceaseless or complex, how some do not sing at all, how the often quiet female has the last word, and why. Hear a baby wren and the author’s own daughter babble as each learns its local dialect. Listen to the mockingbird by night and by day and count how many different songs he can sing. Marvel at the exquisite harmony in the duet of a wood thrush as he uses his two voice boxes to accompany himself. Feel the extraordinary energy in the songs just before sunrise as dawn’s first light sweeps across this singing planet. Hear firsthand the unmistakable evidence that there are not one but two species of marsh wrens and two species of winter wrens in North America. Learn not only to hear but to see birds sing in the form of sonagrams, as these visual images dance across the pages while you listen to the accompanying audio. Using your trained ears and eyes, you can begin your own journeys of discovery. Listen anew to birds in your backyard and beyond, exploring the singing minds of birds as they tell all that they know. Join Kroodsma not only in identifying but in identifying with singing birds, connecting with nature’s musicians in a whole new way. Please note: this ebook includes embedded audio files. You will only be able to access these files from a device that supports embedded audio.

Sirens are sounds that confront us in daily life, from the sounds of police cars and fire engines to, less often, tornado warnings. Ideologies of sirens embody the protective, the seductive and the dangerous elements of siren sounds – from the US Cold War public training exercises in the 1950s and 1960s to the seductive power of the sirens entrenched in popular culture: from Wagner to Dizzee Rascal, from Kafka to Kurt Vonnegut, from Hans Christian Andersen to Walt Disney. This book argues, using a wide array of theorists from Adorno to Bloch and Kittler, that we should understand 'siren sounds' in terms of their myth and materiality, and that sirens represent a sonic confluence of power, gender and destructiveness embedded in core Western ideologies to the present day. Bull poses the question of whether we can rely on sirens, both in their mythic meanings and in their material meanings in contemporary culture.

During the 1920s and 1930s the new medium of radio broadcasting promised to transform society by fostering national unity and strengthening and popularising national cultures. However, many hoped that 'wireless' would also encourage international understanding and world peace. Intentionally or otherwise, wireless signals crossed borders, bringing talk, music, and news to enthusiastic 'distant listeners' in other countries. In Europe, radio was regulated through international consultation and cooperation, to restrict interference between stations, and to unleash the medium's full potential to carry programmes to global audiences. A distinctive form of 'wireless internationalism' emerged, reflecting and reinforcing the broader internationalist movement and establishing structures and approaches which endured into the Second World War, the Cold War, and beyond. This study reveals this untold history. Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening also explores the neglected interwar experience of distant listening, revealing the prevalence of listening across borders and explaining how individuals struggled to overcome unwanted noise, tune in as many stations as possible, and comprehend and enjoy what they heard. The volume shows how radio brought the world to Britain, and Britain to the world. It revises our understanding of early BBC broadcasting and the BBC Empire Service (the precursor to today's World Service) and shows how government influence shaped early BBC international broadcasting in English, Arabic, Spanish, and Portuguese. It also explores the wider European and trans-Atlantic context, demonstrating how Fascism in Italy and Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the Japanese invasion of China, combined to overturn the utopianism of the 1920s and usher in a new era of wireless nationalism.